Shattering Illusions of a Benign World

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From The Wall Street Journal:

John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” published in 1939, begins with a colossal description of dust: “The dawn came, but no day….Houses were shut tight and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes.” This is a book about how the natural environment seals human destiny, even while fathoming human character as has rarely been done in literature.

As the desert marches north, the sharecroppers of Oklahoma head to California. Packing their few belongings, with their farms about to be repossessed, “The men were ruthless because the past had been spoiled, but the women knew how the past would cry to them in the coming days.” These “Okies,” as they were disparagingly called, were people at the margins who experienced what is still in store for tens of millions of people in the 21st century as we head deeper into an era of mass migration. The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh has noted that the regularity of middle-class life dangerously promoted the illusion that the natural world is predictable and benign: an illusion that Steinbeck—and the current coronavirus pandemic—tears apart.

Steinbeck, the 1962 winner of the Nobel Prize, was dismissed by the New York literary elite for his uneven productions and periodic inability to depict characters beyond stereotypes. Yet “The Grapes of Wrath” is full of the most heartbreakingly realized characters, demonstrating how in the midst of a climatically driven mass migration, the most intense and intimate forms of complex human misery take place. “The Grapes of Wrath” achieves the ultimate seamlessness of vast impersonal forces and Shakespearean personal drama. For in the course of uprooting themselves from Oklahoma to California, the Joad family with its almost a dozen members is depleted by more than half: subject to death, desertion and semi-starvation.

Yet their individual characteristics form the narrative. “Nearly all the time the barrier of loneliness cut Uncle John off from people and from appetites. He ate little, drank nothing, and was celibate. But underneath his appetites swelled into pressures….Then he would eat of some craved food until he was sick; or would drink jake or whiskey until he was a shaken paralytic with red wet eyes.” Or the iconic Ma Joad: “She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.” In this epic fight for survival, it is the women who prove to be the saviors, since women internalize the life force better than men do, and are consequently more adaptable.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)